Rink Rats: How the Rangers Beat the Capitals

Last night, the Rangers, Manhattan’s best hockey team, won Game Seven of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs against the Washington Capitals, and not everyone thought they would. What happened? Mainly, the Capitals got Lundqvisted. Henrik Lundqvist is the Rangers’ goalie—their sole, solid-gold, homegrown talent, having been chosen in the seventh round of the 2000 N.H.L. draft. Seventh round, after seventeen other goalies, one of them also chosen by the Rangers! Hockey people like to say that goalies are enigmatic and complicated to assess, and that’s why Lundqvist was overlooked. The Rangers hadn’t even really been interested in him, though. By the seventh round, they had run out of candidates and asked their European scout if he had a suggestion. He had hoped they would draft Lundqvist earlier but was ignored. When teams, like the Detroit Red Wings, consistently find stars in late rounds, especially European stars, people discuss the brilliance of the scouting staff. Goalies are outliers. The scout who found Lundqvist no longer works for the Rangers.

There is a three-sided debate among hockey people over how important goalies are. One side believes that a goalie has only to be statistically a little better than average to help a team win a championship (see Brodeur, Martin). Another side believes that they matter less than the skaters, an attitude exemplified for the last twenty years by the Philadelphia Flyers. The support for their being essential is tepid, and Dominik Hasek—the Dominator, the best goalie of the nineties and early aughts—is their case. The sportswriter Rick Carpiniello, of the Journal News, though, raised an interesting point this morning: whereas strategies can contain a great forward or defenseman, a superb goalie can’t be neutralized. The Rangers won the last two games, 1-0 and 5-0. The Capitals, in their dressing room afterward, talked about having failed to enact their game plan, but mostly they spoke with resignation of Lundqvist. One of the stories in the Washington Post this morning has the headline, “Rangers’ Henrik Lundqvist Silences Capitals.”

I was pleased to see Lundqvist exalted. He is humble and obsessed and deserving, but I was also pleased because more than one prediction for the series rated the Capitals and Rangers as even when it came to goaltending. The Capitals goaltender is named Braden Holtby, a name redolent of Saskatchewan, and he is nothing like Lundqvist’s equal. Holtby had a shutout in Game Two of the series and said that it hadn’t cost him much effort, given the Rangers feckless attack; and so I was gratified to see him brought low. His play simply didn’t rise to the occasion, and in the seventh game he was shredded.

People wonder how the Rangers, not known for scoring goals, managed to score as often as they did in the first round, but it is useful to remember that the Rangers led the N.H.L. in goal-scoring after the trade deadline, when they exchanged with the Columbus Blue Jackets the faltering sniper Marian Gaborik for three players, among them an appealing young hot shot named Derick Brassard, who hadn’t thrived in Ohio. Brassard seemed to take immediately to New York. He is an imaginative passer and thinker, currently fourth in playoff scoring. Being a thinker in hockey matters above everything, if you have the same talent as your peers. Thinkers can superintend a game. They can disrupt strategies; they can find seams and holes and weak points, as Brassard did in Game Six, when he scored the game-winning goal by initially faking a shot and interrupting the pattern of the Washington response. Hockey, being so driven by systems, is vulnerable to thinkers. Coaches watch tapes and think and produce strategies. If you can outthink them, especially at speed, you have upended their work. Teams usually draft for size or speed or what they call character, whatever that is, but because the game demands so much conformity to systems, I’m not sure they value thinking. Of course, thinkers in hockey are as rare as anywhere else. Furthermore, thinking in hockey is guarded against. Often, it presents itself in headstrong players who, as teen-agers, are tagged as uncoachable, which is a near slander in a team sport.

As for Monday’s game, many of the anxious moments were supplied by Alex Ovechkin, the Great 8, who once again led the league in goals, but was subdued by the Rangers’ plan, and perhaps also by himself, as the series went on. Ovechkin doesn’t play the game square, as Don Cherry, the former Bruins coach and current Canadian broadcaster, likes to say. He is huge and fast and daring and scary and possibly malicious. To hit in hockey you have to be able to skate well. If you skate less well than your target, it takes longer to arrive; he hears you coming, and either gets out of your way or braces to hit you harder. Most N.H.L. stars are not big, and, if they are, they aren’t usually fast. Ovechkin is two hundred and thirty pounds. He hunts players down and doesn’t seem to have the reserve other players often do. He slams. Last night, for some reason, he decided he was going to hit people, and he seemed intent on hurting them. He hurt the Rangers’ two star defensemen, Ryan McDonagh and Dan Girardi, cutting McDonagh’s forehead in two places, which caused him to miss shifts while the cuts were closed. Girardi got slowly to his knees after one Ovechkin hit, and seemed for a moment to move at half the speed of the players around him. The Capitals had already driven one important player, Ryane Clowe, from the series with a concussion after a hit by Jason Chimera. The Capitals’ power play is so efficient that the Rangers were at pains not to take penalties, which meant that they couldn’t respond as they might have in the regular season. Ovechkin is a particularly difficult player to respond to, though, because he is fast, and to hit him you have to track him down. Still, his choice to play so aggressively seemed questionable. Playing to hit people takes you out of position. It makes you move differently within the corridors of the game. You’re in the corner, standing over someone, or picking yourself up, instead of in front of the net with the puck, or to the side of the net, waiting for the puck, having slipped your minder. Defensemen are warned not to chase hits, because collectively they tend to be slow. Ovechkin is fast enough to hit and return to play, but he can’t be in two places at once. The play may have moved from where he expected it to be. I can’t imagine any of the Rangers enjoyed being hit so hard, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that it was a cost they were willing to suffer, if it kept Ovechkin preoccupied.

I wonder how banged up the Rangers are and how they will fare against the Boston Bruins on Thursday, in Game One of the next series. Boston is a big, hard-nosed team, with a fearsome banger named Milan Lucic. Every time I see a hockey player get hit hard, I wonder if he has suffered a concussion, a bell-ringer. Once, I interviewed a man named Larry Zeidel, who had played for the Philadelphia Flyers. He was a stockbroker in Philadelphia when I spoke to him, about ten years ago, but in 1955 he had played for the Edmonton Flyers, a minor-league team. A puck hit him in the temple and knocked him out, and when he woke up there was “a buzzing in the top of my head, like the phone’s busy,” he said. In addition, when he touched the hairs on his chest, “it felt like electricity.” The team trainer told him that he was imagining it, and to go back into the game, which Zeidel did. He was an intemperate player, and got thrown out for arguing with a referee. Since the hairs on his chest still felt like electricity, the trainer told him to go to the hospital, which was across the street. He told them about the electricity in his chest hairs, and they told him he had fractured his skull. It took a month before he was able to walk right—”You know, normal,” he said.